A small puff of white billowed up when his equipment packs hit the ground. Thousand-one, thousand-two, he counted silently.

Thump.

His boots thudded into the snow. Instantly he let himself buckle and rolled sideways to absorb the landing shock. At that same moment, a gust of wind caught his collapsing parachute canopy and snapped it back open wide. Dragged behind the chute, he slid across the tundra in a glittering spray of fine ice crystals and powder snow.

Great, Flynn thought with a mental grin. Now he got an impromptu sleigh ride across the frozen ground. Unbidden, that old song “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we go” began playing in his head. But his grandmother’s house was about three thousand miles south of here, and there wasn’t any snow in Central Texas, especially not in October. Hurriedly, he hit one of the two release assemblies on his harness to spill air out of the parachute. That brought his wind-driven skid to a halt.

Overhead, the C-130 turboprop he’d just jumped from was already a diminishing dot in the distance, with the roar of its four engines fading fast. And across the wide-open, white landscape, eleven more men came drifting down out of the cloud-covered sky. One by one, they thumped to the ground, raising little spurts of snow of their own. Counting them off, he breathed out in relief. Although he’d been the first one out of the plane, everyone else in his small unit had followed him off the aircraft’s rear ramp.

Having someone refuse a jump wasn’t usual, but it could happen, and Flynn knew he hadn’t yet gotten to know these men well enough to judge the odds of anyone pulling that kind of boneheaded stunt at the last second. As it was, he’d had to practically beg to get permission for his unit to participate in this practice airborne drop and field exercise. Only the fact that all of them, whether Army, National Guard, or Air Force, had already earned their jump wings earlier in their military service made it even thinkable. But having an aircraft head back to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson with one of his stray sheep still aboard would have given the Pentagon and CIA assholes still gunning for him even more ammunition.

Getting back to his knees, Flynn reeled in his fluttering canopy arm over arm. Quickly, he bundled up the material before stuffing it into a bag clipped to his parachute harness. It took seconds more to struggle out of the harness itself and retrieve his weapons case and rucksack. Pulling out a pair of snowshoes and strapping them on took even more time. Finished at last, he stood up with a grunt and heaved the heavy rucksack onto his back. As a final measure, he slung his M4 carbine over the white camouflage smock he wore on top of his parka.

He brushed snow off his goggles and mask and scanned his wider surroundings. Right before they jumped, the C-130’s crewmen had rolled a pair of large cargo pallets out the open rear ramp. The pallets were loaded with a couple of snowmobiles and towable sleds, plus additional supplies of food, fuel, and ammunition. They’d come down under multiple parachutes, and it looked as though they’d landed intact about three hundred yards from his position.